IPython0.13

This release brings months of slow but steady development, and will be the last before a major restructuring and cleanup of IPython’s internals that is already under way. For this reason, we hope that 0.10 will be a stable and robust release so that while users adapt to some of the API changes that will come with the refactoring that will become IPython 0.11, they can safely use 0.10 in all existing projects with minimal changes (if any).

IPython 0.10 is now a medium-sized project, with roughly (as reported by David Wheeler’s sloccount utility) 40750 lines of Python code, and a diff between 0.9.1 and this release that contains almost 28000 lines of code and documentation. Our documentation, in PDF format, is a 495-page long PDF document (also available in HTML format, both generated from the same sources).

Provide an interactive shell superior to Python's default. IPython has many features for object introspection, system shell access, and its own special command system for adding functionality when working interactively. It tries to be a very efficient environment both for Python code development and for exploration of problems using Python objects (in situations like data analysis).

Serve as an embeddable, ready to use interpreter for your own programs. IPython can be started with a single call from inside another program, providing access to the current namespace. This can be very useful both for debugging purposes and for situations where a blend of batch-processing and interactive exploration are needed.

Offer a flexible framework which can be used as the base environment for other systems with Python as the underlying language. Specifically scientific environments like Mathematica, IDL and Mathcad inspired its design, but similar ideas can be useful in many fields.

Allow interactive testing of threaded graphical toolkits. IPython has support for interactive, non-blocking control of GTK, Qt and WX applications via special threading flags. The normal Python shell can only do this for Tkinter applications.